Patient, 88, Dies After 4-hour Wait

An 88-year-old Martin County woman died in her wheelchair after waiting four hours for emergency care at Martin Memorial Medical Center, hospital officials said Friday.

"This is a very terrible time for the hospital and the family," Martin Memorial spokesperson Pat Austin said. "We are willing to admit that this should never have happened. ... There was a failure in our system."

About 3 p.m. Thursday, Dorothy Cooper of the small Martin County community of Rio was taken to the Martin Memorial emergency room in Stuart by her nurse's aide, Brenda Smith, who has cared for Cooper in her home for more than three years.

Smith, 52, said she decided Cooper needed to see a doctor when she showed strange behavior after eating lunch.

"She kept opening and closing her eyes. I noticed she was acting different than she usually does," Smith said. "So I wheeled the chair out of here and took her to Martin Memorial."

When they arrived, the emergency room staff told her to sit in the waiting room, Smith said.

"We stayed in there for the longest, just sitting up and they were waiting on the different people who came in ... and they took care of them," Smith said. "I'm sitting there about to go crazy because I know they have to take her and I kept saying, `Do you have a bed? Please, how long will it be before you wait on her?' and they kept saying, `She has to wait her turn.'"

Smith said that after an hour, a triage nurse came in to take Cooper's vital signs but then left them in the waiting room. No other staff member examined Cooper in the next three hours, Smith said, even though others in the waiting room vocalized their concern about Cooper's lack of treatment.

"They were saying they had never seen anything like this happen," Smith said.

Finally, about 7 p.m. -- four hours after they first arrived -- Smith said she realized Cooper had stopped breathing and frantically alerted the emergency room staff. By the time they responded, she said, Cooper's heart had stopped.

On Friday, Martin Memorial confirmed that account.

"Somewhere in our system, we failed Mrs. Cooper and we are going to make changes," spokeswoman Austin said. "This is not the way patients should be treated. They shouldn't be in a condition like that, still waiting in the waiting room."

"Our nursing leadership is looking into this," Austin said. "Do we need more staff? Do we need differently trained staff in order to be able to recognize any problems that are developing in the waiting room?

"We need to take steps to improve our triage system to be able to keep monitoring patients who are needing to wait."

"Our policy is, we apologize and we explain," Austin said. "We aren't going to be able to make this up to Mrs. Cooper. The only way we can make it up is to fix the system to make sure that this doesn't happen again."

Smith, Cooper's aide, said she was shaken by the death.

"This is something that I'll never forget," she said, "because this was wrong."